InterContinental Vienna

At the time he was commissioned to prepare and supervise the construction of the InterContinental Hotel, Carl Appel was a well established architect with a large, thriving practice. His office produced a number of buildings for the private and public sectors; these included office buildings, administrative buildings and apartment houses. Immediately following the Second World War, on account of their sound education and experience, Appel and colleagues such as Erich Boltenstern, Max Fellerer and Oswald Haerdtl played a role in the reconstruction of the city – a task that demanded economical construction methods. In his work, Appel distinguished himself above all through his profound talent in tectonics and his willingness to employ new construction methods. The facade of the hotel's reinforced-concrete structure, for example, is clad in Tyrolean sandstone and small-format, colourful mosaic stone; the casting process employed was an innovation that made the cladding particularly robust.

The InterContinental Vienna is 39 metres high, making it one of the city's first skyscrapers. The original design of the hotel foresaw a height of 50 metres, but this was ruled out due to urban planning constraints: on the one hand, the famed view from the Belvedere Palace to Vienna's historic centre would have been lost, and on the other hand, a building of that height would have impeded the air circulation in the neighbouring park, consequently, and endangered its trees. In cooperation with the city's building authority, Appel took the context into account and reduced the building height. In order to accommodate the large program (504 hotel rooms, numerous rooms for social events, extensive building-services installations, and 240 parking spaces), he proposed a T-shaped floor plan and lowered the ceiling height to 2.45 metres. Because the hotel was fully air-conditioned from the start, the building authority approved the latter change. The reduced ceiling height was not merely an attempt to increase the hotel's floor area, but may also be considered part of a tradition dating back to the early twentieth century, when Adolf Loos developed his Raumplan: the height of a space was determined based on its use.